With the development of the society, people need to contact more and more other people or organizations. How to store and manage information about these contacts is a big challenge for the modern generation. Conventionally, contact information is stored and managed in paper form, such as compiled and printed yellow pages, address list of enterprises, and personal telephone directories kept by individuals. For managing contact information in paper form, there exist some defects, for example, being inconvenient to carry, look up and modify, so it cannot keep up with the times. With the development of electronic information technology, address list management system on computer arises, but a computer cannot be carried about and cannot perform such contacting operations as dialing a phone number according to the result of search, so such address list management system still is not satisfactory.
Nowadays, such mobile devices as cell phones and PDAs have become indispensable tools for life and work, and such tools generally also have built-in address lists. However, said address lists have the following defects: single function, i.e. they can only store such fixed information as telephone numbers of the contacts, but cannot record the various ways of communication that are currently in use; limited storage capacity, i.e. the address lists of most of the existing mobile devices have a limitation in capacity, for example, they can store 500 or 1000 pieces of contact information at most; inconvenience for input, i.e. it is almost impossible to input a large amount of contact data into said mobile devices; some cell phones at present have PC terminal management software, so the contact information can be inputted at the PC terminal to form a data file, and then said file is imported to the cell phone, but since address lists of existing different mobile devices have different formats, and data inputted to the PC terminal can only be imported to mobile devices of the same type, the owner of different mobile devices has to input the same contact information to different mobile devices, thus the repeated work results in a waste of manpower. Meanwhile, most of the cell phone terminals at present can only manage one address list file, so when new address list file is imported, the original address list file will be overwritten, in other words, in the prior art, one cell phone cannot accept multiple data files having different data items generated at various PC terminals. In addition, the existing address lists are only capable of simply grouping management, which is far from satisfying the practical needs in a time with more and more complicated social organization structure.
To overcome some of the above-mentioned defects, there are also some solutions in the prior art, for example, China Patent No. ZL03157125.5, (Title: Telephone Directory Information Sharing System of a Mobile Phone), which discloses a telephone directory information sharing system used among a plurality of mobile phones. The mobile phones are capable of sending and receiving email, and newly recorded or changed telephone directory information can be shared in any group via email; but said method is only suitable for information updating of the already registered contacts, namely, when the information of a person changes, his information recorded on the cell phones of his contacts, which has been recorded by the person, can be updated by means of email. It only has a single function, and most cell phones and mobile networks currently do not support email sending. Another example is China Application No. 200410049886.5, (Title: A Telephone Directory System and A Method for Telephone Directory Updating and Calling at the Mobile Inquiry Terminal), wherein a telephone directory system is disclosed, which is used in mobile communication network and comprises a directory server for storing user contact information containing user identity and several contact identities contained in each user, and the purpose of said application is the same as that of the above-mentioned China Patent No. ZL03157125.5, i.e. for conveniently informing contacts of the user when the contact information of said user has been changed. In China Application No. 200510020290.7 (A Construction Method of a Treelike Address List), a construction method of a treelike address list has been disclosed, which focuses on categorizing the contacts. The categories are subdivided into sub-categories, and the categorization structure is treelike. The same contact can be placed in different categories, but information of all contacts are in the same data link list file. Said method concerns establishing, deleting and changing the treelike structure of the contacts, and the data structure of the system, and it implements algorithms of searching, adding, deleting and changing contacts, and all the implementations are based on operation on the link list data of the same contact, so it still cannot achieve the purpose of importing data inputted at a plurality of PC terminals to a plurality of mobile inquiry terminals of different models.
The existing techniques fail to solve the problems that the mobile inquiry terminals have limited storage capacity and that it is difficult to input, backup and import the contact information, and that the contact information cannot be transferred and shared among mobile inquiry terminals of different platforms and different models